Business

Myspace's New Architects Reveal How to Rebuild a Brand

There's perhaps nothing harder than changing the public perception of a brand once it's been imprinted in popular culture's psyche. Especially when it's left a bad taste in users' mouths. But that was exactly the job facing Ben Johnston and Jess Huddart, CEO and creative director of Josephmark, the 25-person Australian studio tasked with rebuilding the new Myspace from the ground up.

The duo recently came to Los Angeles where they spoke with Mashable about the challenges and successes of redesigning a brand. They say the project's goal is to bring the site back to its simple core values of music and artist discovery. They want the new Myspace to be visually captivating enough to keep and gain new users, so they're incorporating a design reminiscent of Tumblr and Pinterest.

Q&A With CEO Ben Johnston and Creative Director Jess Huddart

What was the process of getting this account and working with Myspace?

Ben Johnston: My design agency, based out of Australia, did a lot of online projects. One of those projects in 2009 was a site called wearehunted, which we co-founded with an associate business in Brisbane. They had a news aggregation platform.

Jess Huddart: So, we grew wearehunted. What I effectively did was create a music chart which was centered around emerging musicians. It also looked at more mainstream charts and what was charting and we just weighed the different places and the levels of where that sentiment was coming from then. That led us into a lot of music based projects

Johnston: Myspace put out a global tender and when Specific Media took over they decided to relaunch the whole site.

Huddart: I guess with the depth of experience we've gained over the past few years, we applied that...if you were to start from scratch with Myspace what would you do?

There was a lot of talk about rebranding Myspace completely. What were your thoughts on a name change?

Huddart: That question has been brought up by outside parties, but the name was one of main things when they bought Myspace. They bought Myspace sort of (for that) brand recognition.

Johnston: There is still a lot of value in the fact that if you've been using the Internet for the past 15 years (you know Myspace)...It presents a challenge with perception, the new owners of Myspace really wanted to start from scratch and to have the opportunity to work on a brand as big as Myspace.

Huddart: We're up for a good challenge and we believe that the approach that they've taken in terms of really reinventing the product is the right one.

Johnston: It was more excitement. We're going to not only make ourselves relevant, but we are going to try to bring it back to its former glory. At that time we responded to the tender and our vision sort of aligned with their vision.

Tell me about the UX / UI process.

Huddart: We knew the site was going to be feature rich, but we wanted to make sure that the actual experience was very clean and simple and was user friendly as opposed to being overwhelmed by all of the things that Myspace can do.

In terms of the UX, I think we had the original navigation structure and mainframe of the site done in quite a short space of time. A few months, really. And then it was about building features into that and testing that would work until we felt comfortable...

We broke it down to three different user experiences: creative, creator and the consumer. People know Myspace as a music site, for musicians, and we focused on that community initially and thought "what are the other things that they would want to do?" A lot of that boiled down to the promotional part of their work. If we could solve that and it was effective, that was the basis of that community. Part of that mechanism is the discovery.

The board look of the site reminds me of Pinterest. How much of that influenced you?

Huddart: It's funny, we never really consciously drew on any of these influences (despite) people's reviews of the site. I think our work has always been very visual and we knew that with this site we needed to convert the visual as much as possible.

What's been the reception of the site from the design community and the general public?

Johnston: Overwhelmed. In a good way.

Huddart: It started in September last year where we gave a taste of the video. That allowed us to bring Myspace back to the front of people's minds and go "this is going to be something that I want to check out." Since then we have been closed beta bringing users on to the social network element of the site.

Any special directives from Specific media or new vice president Justin Timberlake on design?

Johnston: Justin Timberlake and the Vanderhook brothers are very switched on, smart, energetic guys. Justin also brought the entertainers that he sort of has in his inner circle and implanted (them) into Myspace. We have daily interaction with those guys. You can see that influence in terms of Justin. He was really interested and influential: "This should be about music," and creativity. That influenced the site. So that meant that we didn't go down a pure path of just music consumption and discovery. There is very much a start up mentality in the office. Which means that changes can happen quickly.

Can you give any hints on what else is coming in terms of the redesign?

Huddart: A lot of work at the moment is being done around the artists and how the site can help an artist to promote themselves to the audience. Currently you have an artist profile and it looks like any other user and then you get into their music catalog. But, pulling a lot of that catalog data out and putting it on the front page so when the slot opens up at the moment. This will also be built out a lot. Insights and analytics will be coming in pages where anyone can look at their top bands and go into detail whether it is geographic location, demographic information.

What's been the biggest challenge?

Johnston: The biggest challenge is Myspace has had a place in a lot of people's hearts during their formative years. It was sort of a relationship for people and then sort of lost its way. There are a lot of deep seeded feelings, which is the emotional response from people. In one way you can look at this like an ex partner coming back. We didn't want to create something that was subpar or that was on par. It had to be beyond the expectation of those interactions to really rekindle the relationship. There's been that higher expectation pressure beyond internal team and vision, but the community. How can you create a product that lives up to that and truly become a part of someone's life again? That question has been the driving force.

Can you make Myspace cool again? Can it reclaim its space as one of the top social media organizations?

Huddart: I think it has already. We've seen that it has already started. That's the response we've got, that it is something being taken seriously. It can be a major player.

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